Dark Water - Laura McNeal [44]
“That sounds ambitious,” my father said.
“I lack no confidence,” Robby said, and this appeared to be true. When he raised a hand to wave at us, Mary Beth waved and followed him to the car under the pepper tree, leaving me alone again with my father.
“So where are you staying tonight?” I asked, and then regretted it, not really wanting to imagine his preferred life.
“Our new condo,” he said.
“Our what?”
“A condo in San Diego. We sold a little triplex in Scottsdale and needed the other leg of a ten thirty-one exchange, so I thought, hey, why not buy myself something that would be a good investment and keep me within striking distance of my little girl? I was hoping you’d come and stay with me for the weekend, see what kind of furniture you’d like to put in the second bedroom.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by “we.” Usually, that meant him and his business partner. But now it might mean him and the person who owned the apartment in Paris. It certainly didn’t mean my mother.
“Oh. There’s something I have to do tomorrow,” I said.
“Can’t it wait? I was really looking forward to spending the weekend with you.”
“It’s a big project,” I said. “It’s half my grade.”
“Why don’t I just drive by the house, you pick up your books and whatever you need, and you can work on the project in the condo? There’s this big window overlooking the bay. You can see Coronado Island. The aircraft carriers. Little white sailboats. It’s beautiful, I’m telling you. I have a desk right by the window where you can sit.”
“I would,” I said, “but it’s a group project.”
“Okay,” he said, giving up. “Next time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Next time.”
Twenty-six
My mother was sitting at the desk when I came in that night, a bowl of cocoons beside her computer.
“How were the birds?” I asked.
“We saw a grebe,” she said. Then she went back to considering the cocoons. There were nine little white ovals even though she’d started with twenty-five worms, and based, my mother said, on the research she’d been doing all evening, she would need to kill them if she wanted to get the silk off the cocoons in one unbroken strand.
“What do you mean, ‘kill them’?”
My mother looked glumly at a page of text on her screen. “I guess they bake them at silk factories. They bake most of them, anyway. A few of them they allow to go through metamorphosis or there wouldn’t be any eggs at the end of the cycle.”
We were both silent for a few seconds. Then I said, “So the worm builds the cocoon in order to become a butterfly—”
“A moth, actually,” my mother said. She showed me a picture of a white moth. It had a black dot on each wing and a face that seemed mostly mustache. It was nothing you’d want to prevent from entering the world.
“It eats twenty-four hours a day for three weeks to build the cocoon to become a beautiful furry moth,” I said, “but then you kill it while it’s still a worm.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “But Louise says she tried it one time and the stench was terrible. You’re supposed to bake them at a low temperature for a long time—all day, I think, or maybe a few days, and she said she almost had to burn down the house, the smell was so awful.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s a sign that you shouldn’t kill stuff for thread?” I gently touched one of the cocoons. “How much silk would you really be getting out of this, anyway?” I asked.
“Well, each strand is a mile long.”
We looked at the cocoons. Each one was smaller than my thumb.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to bake the dear cats,” my mother said. Early on in her research, she’d discovered that people who are fanatical about raising silkworms call them “cats,” which is short for caterpillars. “But you know, the moth doesn’t have that much to look forward to. The silk business is easier if the moths can’t fly, so the bad fliers have been preserved over the centuries while the good fliers have been killed. Apparently, when the moth eats its way out of the cocoon, it will just wait for a mate right there in the same spot. You don’t need a net or a cage or anything. The moth will mate, or not mate, and if